Want To Make A Pile Of Money? Start With A Pile Of Garbage

Let’s start with the phrase “anaerobic digester.”  What’s that, you say?  Simply put, it’s a high-tech plant that transforms food waste — orange peels, corn cobs, leftovers, oil, grease, table scraps, supermarket waste, restaurant plate leavings, school lunch room trash, cans, bottles, milk cartons, even (ugh!) road kill— all sorts of unimaginable crud, and turns it into fertilizer, potting soil and clean biogas.

Sound like wizardry?  Maybe, but it’s happening as you read this.  And it’s enabling entrepreneurs who see the gold in garbage to drive around in expensive imports and live in McMansions.

After the smelly, rotting waste is collected under contract from municipalities, schools, supermarkets and restaurants, it’s then trucked to a high-tech facility where it’s dumped into long, deep pits.  Air pressure inside the structure keeps the odors from escaping, and the neighbors from complaining.  Here this slew is watered down so all the twisty ties, baggies, straws, sporks, broken glass, cans and foil gets separated.  Plastics and paper float to the top and metals and grit sink to the bottom.

Next, the remaining gunk goes into huge tanks where it’s left to stew in a soup of a gazillion trillions hungry microbes who chow down on it, releasing biogas which is captured and sold to power utilities.  Cash crop one.

Twenty days later, what’s left gets squeezed and blended with landscape leavings to create a rich, nutrient-filled potting soil.  Cash crop two.

The liquid leftover is high in ammonium sulfate, an ingredient in plant food.  Cash crop three.

Okay, that’s the basic operation.  But let your imagination run wild and you can see this could be a win/win operation for cities all across the globe.  With similar facilities, either municipally or commercially owned, food waste gets collected, processed, and the by-products of soil, fertilizer, plant food and biogas are sold.  The whole process pays for itself.

Who would have thunk it?  Science and microbes working together turning garbage into gold. Folks may say that technology is the future.. we say that its garbage.